This will output all possible help options. So, when you finished installing MacPorts open a terminal (you can find this in your Applications/Utilities folder as Terminal.app) and try to see if it worked by executing: To install it, get your original Mac OS X install discs and install it from there. This is Apple’s developer toolkit that comes bundled with every Mac but isn’t installed automatically with Mac OS X. Make sure you have installed Xcode first. To start you first have to download the appropriate package and install it. At the moment i’m writing this, 4376 applications can be installed using MacPorts. MacPorts is a software package that makes the whole process of running free and open source applications under Mac OS X a whole lot simpler by providing a simple command that you can run from the terminal. Phew.įortunately there is a solution and it’s called MacPorts. However, if you’re like me and you are more interested in making movies than converting them you might get a little scared by the fact that FFmpeg is command-line only, doesn’t come with good documentation and can only be ‘built from source’, which means that you can’t actually download the thing and run it, you have to compile it first. That’s very handy if you want to convert your DVD’s to XVID, a movie to a format you can play on your iPod or PSP or a Flash movie you can use on your website without needing to buy the whole Flash software package. Basically, FFmpeg is a command-line tool that allows you to convert virtually any video and audio format to another format.

If you have ever delved into the deep caves of video encoding and transcoding you’ve probably come along FFmpeg, the ‘swiss army knife’ of video encoding tools. For now i would recommend installing Homebrew, and simply typing brew install ffmpeg. Notice: this article is pretty outdated, and things have gotten a lot simpler.

Installing ffmpeg mac os x